The introductory chapter scans a series of long-standing paradoxes that characterize dominant white Dutch self-representation and, in doing so, also rewrites significant aspects of Dutch history and self-understanding. Together these paradoxes reiterate the deeply rooted, self-flattering notion of innocence in the domain of race, which is a technology of the self that safeguards exceptionalism. In addition, the chapter lays out the three key concepts of the book: innocence, the cultural archive, and white Dutch self-representation. Finally, the innovative approach of the book is situated in its intersectional method, interrupting the color-blind ways in which intersectionality has largely been taken up in European gender studies, in its unusual bringing together of metropole and colonies in one analytical field and in addressing both the eastern, “Our Indies,” and western parts of the empire, Suriname and the Dutch Antilles. Personal, narrative sequences situate the author in the entire text.